The previous Government decided that there were to many young people unemployed and as a result they would introduce a scheme to effectively guarantee 18 to 25 year olds who had been out of work for 12 months a job.
The scheme provides upto £6,500 per person given a job. That is equivalent of just over £3 per hour for a full time worker. If you owned a supermarket paying £6 per hour, would you be tempted to take on some of these young people and save £3 per hour in employment cost? With wages being one of the highest costs to a supermarket, will we see profits double for £3 billion to £6 billion? :)
My concern is that if any government scheme or indeed any other initiative that is introduced that subsidises the cost of employing someone (whatever their age) results in employers taking on people from that age group.
Great you might say, that is the objective!
Sadly the fact is simply this … there is a limited amount of work to be done, and therefore a limited number of people are required to carry out that work. If an employer can get someone to meet some of their employment costs they will do so … replacing someone else who they cannot get help with, with someone who they can.
If there is say, 25 million jobs and 30 million people wanting to work, then however you look at it, 5 million won’t be working. What worries me is if 170,000 jobs are going to go to younger people, does that mean that 170,000 older people will lose theirs?
New initiatives should focus on CREATING NEW jobs. Perhaps one approach would be to restrict the amount of goods that are imported, and get back into manufacturing again. Long term being a provider of essentially ’service’ jobs just will not work.
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